Storykiller (23 page)

“Why would he do that?” Tessa demanded. “He saved our lives out there. I doubt he did it just so he could tear us to pieces in the living room a few hours later.”

Robin shook his head. “That’s not what she means. She means that he won’t be in control. He’s less in control of his actions in his wolf state, and that, added to the disorientation and pain—it could go badly.” Tessa rubbed her forehead with a bloody hand.

“We have to try it. We can’t just leave him like this.”

Robin thought for a moment and looked at Fenris’s giant, exceedingly dangerous form and then nodded in agreement. Snow sighed. Tessa repositioned herself so that she could pin down his neck and front legs. She nodded her head at Robin and Snow. “You two hold down his back legs. Brand?” Brand stepped forward. “Uncap the salts and hold it over him and then get out of here.” Brand nodded and took the bottle from Micah, who stepped back toward the kitchen. “On three,” Tessa said, meeting everyone’s eyes and waiting for their nods of understanding. “One…Two…Three,” Tessa said. As soon as Brand uncapped the bottle near his head, the wolf sprang to life and threw the entire group off of him with one powerful convulsion. Brand was halfway to the kitchen, and Robin and Snow skittered back toward the door as well, but Tessa found herself face to face with the giant animal.

“I know you’re in there,” she whispered, her face mere inches from his, a snarl curling his black mouth. “Fenris,” she said more firmly when he didn’t shift but didn’t attack either. “You need to shift so that we can fix you.”

Something akin to understanding flickered in the wolf’s eyes, and then he shifted, becoming human (and still very naked). Tessa pulled a blanket from the sofa over his shoulders and helped him into the kitchen, or as she had now come to think of it, ‘Triage 1.’

Micah brought some dishtowels over to flesh out the pillaged first aid kit, and Brand brought some water in a bowl. Everyone stood in the kitchen staring. Fenris stared back at them, seeming inhuman and empty, stiff and barely in control of himself. Tessa turned away from him to the group. “Guys. Can you give me a minute?” Micah, Brand, and Snow shook their heads as if being woken from a dream. All three nodded, leaving the kitchen for the dining room and the pile of unread books there. Robin hesitated.

“No,” he said, his arms crossed, his eyes some mixture of protection, suspicion, and jealousy that Tessa both loved and hated. Fenris started to shift and groaned as he fought the urge to return to wolf form
. Tessa looked imploringly at Robin.

“Please, Robin,” she said. His mouth twitched, and then he turned to join the others. Tessa watched him go for a moment, and when he was out of sight, she turned back to Fenris. She didn’t meet his eyes, as she wasn’t sure what she would find there and wasn’t sure she wanted to know, regardless. The shoulder wound was the worst of it, something that looked born of both claws and teeth, so Tessa stood up and cleaned the gash. He winced and tensed up, and twice started to shift before regaining control. It was terrifying to watch. Both to see his features move, almost like water, shifting from something so stunningly beautiful to something both beautiful and terrifying. From a man that most women would delight to dream about into a wolf, a monster, that would haunt your worst nightmares. Watching him struggle to maintain control raised all sorts of questions in Tessa about how in control he ever was. And how human he was when he was a wolf. How wolf he was when he was a human. They were questions she wasn’t sure she wanted the answers to. Tessa blinked, it was too scary. With his shoulder clean and bandaged, Tessa moved onto the less intense wounds and her mind drifted back to the battlefield, he had saved all their lives, monster or no.

“Thank you,” Tessa said as she cleaned and bandaged one of his hands. He touched her forearm suddenly, lightly, where one of her own bandages was.

“Looks like I fell short, Hardcore,” he said, looking up at her and their eyes catching. Tessa pulled away from the gaze with some effort. S
he didn’t want him using whatever seduction-y Fictional power he had on her.

“No. You were amazing. Without you, we’d all be dead,” she said, busying herself with the next wound. Ten minutes later,
he was cleaned up and peppered with bits of white gauze. “You should sleep,” Tessa said, as she closed the kit.

“Can’t,” he said. Tessa looked up from the kit,
waiting for the rest of the sentence. “If I sleep I’ll shift and all your fancy bandages will be for nothing.”

“Oh,” Tessa said. “Okay, well then, let’s—” and before she could finish the sentence, he stood up and she snapped her head to the side. “—Yo!” she yelped, holding up her hands to further block the view of his still-naked body. He looked down at himself
but didn’t move. Tessa called for Brand.

“Yeah?” he said, popping his head in the room and then snapping his eyes closed and raising his hands.
“Jesus, Tessa, you couldn’t warn me?”

“Sorry,” Tessa said giggling. “Can you grab some clothes from my Dad’s room? Nothing will fit, but in the bottom drawer of the dresser, there should be some sweats and undershirts that might sorta work.” Brand nodded, his eyes still closed and then visored his eyes and walked through the kitchen with his head down. Fenris continued standing, rather oblivious. Micah came in looking for Brand, saw Fenris, dropped a plate and turned back around without saying a word. Tessa gestured at him.

“Um…could you sit please?”

Fenris smiled. “Of course.”

When Tessa felt him sitting again, she looked up. “Shy much?”

“What is there to be shy about?”

“I’ll say,” Tessa heard Micah whistle from the other room. Two minutes later, a pair of grey sweatpants and a white ribbed undershirt tank came hurtling into the kitchen. Tessa fetched them for Fenris and then left the room. He came out a moment later.

“Christ on a bike,” Micah said under her breath, and Tessa smacked her lightly on the arm. Robin sort of glared at both of them. The sweats were slightly too large for Fenris’s lean lower body, and the undershirt was far too small for his broad, muscled chest. The result was hilarious but also somehow hot. He and Snow together looked like a weird,
perfectly mismatched pair. And they must have known it because they practically growled at one another.

“Everyone get over themselves,” Tessa said, rolling her eyes. “We’re all lucky to be alive. Or since you don’t die, then I guess I’m lucky to be alive, and you three are lucky to have all your limbs…do you lose limbs?”

Snow, Fenris, and Robin all made faces and wavered one hand as if to suggest that the jury was still out, or maybe that it was negotiable.

Tessa groaned. “Well, that’s not confusing at all.”

Brand raised his hand. Tessa smiled at him and then nodded her head. “Yeah?”

“Um. Can we talk about the fact that you have a magical axe that you conjured out of thin freaking air?! What’s up with that?”

Micah nodded beside him. Tessa reached out her hand.

“LA COLOMBE NOIRE!” she shouted and the axe reappeared.

“Yeah, that.” Brand said pointing at it.

Tessa turned to Brand. “The Black, what?”

Brand raised an eyebrow at her. “Little Miss European Boarding School doesn’t speak French?”

“Listen, I speak a little bit of a whole lot of languages, none of it well…you want me to chop you with this thing?”

Brand raised his hands in mock surrender. “The Black Dove.”

Tessa smiled and gripp
ed the axe. “Yeah, that feels right,” she said and then looked at Snow. “Do you know anything about it?”

Snow shook her head. “Not really. I heard Bluebeard had a weapon made for himself, but I’d never seen it
. ‘The White Dove’
is, or rather
was
the name for one of the variations of Bluebeard’s story, perhaps he named it after that?”

“Are you the only one that can call it?” Micah asked.

“I don’t know,” Tessa said thoughtfully and put it down on the floor, where it promptly disappeared after a few seconds.

“Badass,” Brand whispered.

“Give it a try,” Tessa said to Micah who shook her head.

“Oh, no, I didn’t mean me.”

“I’ll do it!” Brand shouted.

Tessa nodded at him. “Go for it.”

Brand reached out his hand. “Like this?” Tessa nodded and Brand shouted into the air, “LA COLOMBE NOIRE!” with perfect pronunciation, far better than Tessa’s. Everyone waited while absolutely nothing happened. Brand’s shoulders dropped. “Damn,” he said, and Tessa gave him an apologetic look. After a moment Tessa called the axe again. It immediately
crackled and snapped into her hand. Brand smiled.

“I say again, badass.”

“How did you get it?” Robin asked.

“She killed Bluebeard with it,” Fenris said,
and Tessa shot him a look. She hadn’t realized he’d seen it.

She looked at Robin. “Yes,” she said. “That’s right.”

“Then I suspect—” Robin started and then trailed off, as if unwilling to finish the thought.

“—That it belongs to you until you’re dead too,” Fenris supplied, locking eyes with Tessa. She felt a chill run up her spine, yet again. He had a penchant for speaking truth, no matter how unpleasant. Tessa doubted he meant that it would cease to be hers after she passed away at the ripe old age of ninety, sleeping peacefully in her bed.

Tessa wanted to change the subject so she walked back into the foyer where the dead Franken-Dog still laid on the floor, stinking up the whole house. “Thank you, by the way, Fenris, for bringing a giant corpse Franken-Dog into my house. And why exactly did you do that?” Fenris crouched down and turned the dog, wincing from his wounds.

“Wolves have been disappearing. Ever since late summer I’ve seen, and felt, fewer of them in the woods,” he said and pointed to the creature’s head, which was clearly that of a wolf. But he continued turning the creature and pointed to the torso and two legs, which looked more like they belonged to a large dog. “But this part, and this, these are dog, not wolf. And most of them were like that, parts of each.”

“So the creatures are made of dogs and wolves, so what?” Snow asked.

“I’m the only one likely to miss the wolves,” Fenris said, laying the dog back down.

“But people will miss their dogs,” Tessa filled in. “Is anyone here good with computers?” Nobody said anything, but Micah looked straight at Brand. Everyone else followed her gaze.

“Yeah?” Tessa said, part question, part statement. Brand folded his arms.

“Okay, yeah, yeah, I am,” he paused and added, “But if this is some kind of dangerous solo mission I’m volunteering for, then no, no, I am not.”

“It’s not,” Fenris said and then looked at Tessa. “Where’s the computer?”

“My laptop is upstairs,” Tessa said and moved to go get it, but Brand put a hand on her arm.

“I’ve got mine,” he sighed,
and everyone followed him to the dining room where he pulled it out of his bag. “What am I looking for?”

“Reports of missing animals,” Fenris said.

“Wait. From where?
‘Good with computers’
is not code for, like, totally able to hack into the Lore PD database, or, whatever,” he snapped defensively. And then Micah put a hand on his shoulder.

“Ohmigod,” she breathed.

“What?” he asked, still annoyed.

“What if it’s not you being good with computers that matters, but you speaking all languages that matters?”

Brand was silent for a moment. And then there was a flurry of typing, and the screen was a blur of changing images, pages moving almost faster than the eye could register.

“Holy crap,” Brand said, “I speak computer.”

Half an hour later, they’d marked up a large map of Lore with a red sharpie, trying to find a pattern to the reports of missing dogs. The map was littered with x’s. They covered the entire city. Brand continued clicking around his laptop at an almost alarming speed and then stopped. “Um…guys?”

“What?” Tessa asked, looking up from the map.

“It’s not just dogs,” he said, his face looking a bit green. Everyone crowded around the laptop to see a list of missing people, more than two dozen in just the last month.

The room took a collective breath.

“No,” Tessa said quietly, almost to herself, “Does this mean there are Franken-People walking around too?”

The room was silent.

In another half hour, they’d mapped out where all the people had disappeared as well. They all stood back and stared at the map for a long time, absorbing the enormity of what all the red marks meant.

Death, every one of them.

Snow broke the silence. “So, is there a plan in our future? Because it better be superior to the last one. I’m not about to potentially get torn to shreds by killer dogs
again
this weekend.”

Tessa looked up, bleary-eyed and stared at the room, everyone looking to her for answers. It was too much.

“A good time for The Advocate,” Fenris said.

“Goddammit, stop mentioning The Advocate!” Tessa shouted, and she was gone before any of them had time to respond.